I don’t really have any particular game mechanics in mind but it seemed like fun a little art project to sharpen my skills.
I’m using the Unreal Engine 4 for the actual game, but I’m doing the modeling in Blender and the texturing in Krita (great opensource alternative for Gimp).
I started by creating a “low-poly” model of the character (if you can call 25,135 triangles low poly):
turn-around:
The folds of the dress, sleeves and skirts consist entirely of normal maps and the pearls are basically just circles facing the camera to keep the poly-count as low as possible without losing to much detail.
Animating a walk animation with a multi layered dress was quite a challenge. My fist idea was to use ingame cloth physics, but this would be too hard on the processor and slow everything down. So I Eventually decided to keep the structure stiff so that the skirts don’t move too much relative to each other. I also temporarily removed the pearls because I haven’t yet figured out how to add normal maps to billboards (images facing the camera) in Unreal Engine 4.
(Rendered with OpenGL)
Because the dress would clip into the terrain when standing on sloped edges, I thought of a mechanic where the character can move tangent to the terrain. So it can basically walk on steep hills and walls. The gravity is also a lot lower which causes higher and slower jumping. This fitted with the theme of an alien creature on a distant planet and might help me in coming up with an idea for some interesting gameplay. I’d like to show a demo, but I can’t seem to find any good screen capture software.
Here’s a quick screenshot of the model in the game:
The colors look a bit different because I used colored lighting to lit my scene in Unreal Engine.
As you can see there’s some pretty bad shading errors on the UFO and the terrain texture is pretty ugly too.
I’m thinking of making a more stylized hand painted texture for the terrain. The current terrain texture is a combination of different pictures taken by the mars Curiosity rover.
